The Devil's Mask

by Christopher Wakling

  The mess could only harm the Western Trading Company as and when it came to light.

  If the Company suffered, Father would suffer too.

  He’d not keep that suffering to himself. Upon discovering I had been instrumental in bringing it about, he’d be liberal in sharing the harm.

  So I waited up to tell Carthy what I’d found, fearful that a night spent sleeping on the matter might fatally weaken my resolve. I spent the time making a sketch. Or at least endeavouring to make one. As so often happened, the blank page had about it something of the quality of a reversed magnet. My attention simply skated away from it. Perhaps I was more preoccupied than I’d realised. That’s the trouble with doing the right thing. A man can talk himself out of it so easily. What was the right thing to do about Lilly, for example? I pushed my sketchbook away, dragged my chair over to the window casement and stood upon it to inspect the flap of wallpaper which, Anne no doubt having suffered another bath night, had unpeeled further, a longitudinal slit, revealing a slice of naked plaster wall. Perhaps I could stick it back together with some sealing wax. I rummaged in my desk drawer for a block of the stuff and, candle in hand, was back up on my chair, flame and wax held aloft, dripping red drops down behind the slack wall covering, when Carthy appeared in my doorway.

  ‘You can walk away from the job at any time, Inigo. No need to burn the place down.’

  ‘I was just –’ I began.

  ‘– but if you’re intent on making a statement, there has to be something easier to set fire to than that.’ Carthy swept his hand in the general direction of my desk. ‘That lot. I’d set fire to a box of it and throw it into the coal hole. Puff! All our troubles would be over!’

  I had climbed down from my chair. I set it before Carthy now, and steered him to sit down. His movements were drink-blunted; he slumped heavily on to the seat and threw an arm over its back. I had seen him the worse for wear before now – often enough through eyes dimmed by the contents of the same bottle – but the warm abandonment Carthy usually exhibited seemed tinged with something more reckless that evening. ‘You’re right, though,’ he was saying now. ‘The furnishings aren’t up to scratch.’ He dug at the threadbare rug with the toe of his shoe. ‘I’ll have the matter attended to. Appearances count, after all.’

  At that moment there was a shout in the street outside. Carthy flinched even before the riposte came, a drunken oath followed by laughter, common enough at such an hour in town. Wondering at his jumpiness, I poured my master a glass of water from the jug on my desk. Then I told him my further misgivings about the accounts.

  He appeared to listen. He nodded and sipped and stared at the cloudy water in his glass. Then his toe started tracing the pattern on the rug again. By the time I finished speaking, it was all but tapping.

  ‘Hmm. Yes. Interesting,’ Carthy said absently.

  ‘I thought so at least.’

  ‘And you’ve been through all their import accounts – anchovies to yams and back again – to spot where duties have and haven’t been paid?’

  ‘I have,’ I smiled. ‘Anchovies to yams.’

  ‘Well, I suppose we must pass all this on to Orton at the Dock Company.’

  At this I repressed an urge to state my family’s interest in the case.

  ‘But it’s all a bit …’ Carthy tossed back the last of his water and upended the empty glass. ‘… a bit dry, don’t you think?’

  ‘Dry?’

  He kneaded his temples, then rubbed his palm across his furrowed eyebrows, making them bristle all the more. He yawned. I felt impatience prickle across my scalp. I hadn’t waited up half the night, struggling with my conscience, to have my findings brushed aside like this. ‘Perhaps we should continue the conversation in the morning,’ I said.

  Carthy rubbed his eyes and muttered, ‘No need.’ Then he yawned again. Something wasn’t right with the gesture. Yawns satisfy; this one was perfunctory, over too quickly. It was fake. The drink-blur seemed to have faded fast, too.

  ‘No need?’ I repeated.

  ‘I think we need to look somewhere a bit wetter. Juicier detail, that’s what we need.’

  ‘Wetter?’

  ‘The docks. That ship, the Belsize. Have you been on board her yet? Kicked the timbers, sniffed about in the hold?’

  ‘No, I –’

  ‘Well, that’s the thing.’ Another mock-yawn. ‘The thing to do next. I’ll set up a paperwork meeting with Orton for later in the week. In the meantime …’ Carthy climbed heavily from the chair, stretched out his back, rubbed his forehead again, and waved expansively from the desk to the window. ‘In the meantime you see if you can’t come up with something … I don’t know … something to set fire to the show.’

  Nine

  As a boy I had a recurring daydream in which every physical thing before me appeared as a prop I’d seen used in a previous scene; likewise, everybody around me was an actor I’d watched before playing a different part. How could they think I would not notice that the man selling mussels on the quay was in fact my Latin master in a poor disguise? Even my own brothers cropped up as market-place extras, my father as the visiting preacher glimpsed from the back of the cathedral. The daydream created the illusion that I was at the centre of things, influencing the deployment of these actors and props, that some inner process of my mind was in fact shaping events, so that the word marigold, say, overheard on my way to the cobbler’s, would turn up just minutes later as Mary’s gold, a fortune inherited by the cobbler’s cousin upon the death of her aged father. Who but me were these echoes orchestrated for, who else could wring meaning from the connections?

  Too much coffee. I ordered a refill all the same. Up early, I’d been Thunderbolts’ first customer, which in itself had heightened my sense that the story in Felix Farley’s newspaper had been written with me in mind. Now the place was filling up, diminishing my significance, and underlining the foolishness of my delusion. It was a coincidence, nothing more. Nevertheless, I opened the newspaper and read the story again. Until a few days ago I’d never heard of the Western Trading Company. Now it turned out that the Clifton Killer had been discovered attempting to bury his victim’s body in the footings of a mansion to be built on the Company’s land.

  So what?

  It was hardly the most interesting detail in the report, most of which seemed to me to undermine its own assertion, in support of Justice of the Peace Jim Wheeler, that the culprit was safely in hand.

  The suspect had been named as one Ivan Brook, a local man born and bred. The allegation against this fine Bristolian was that having received his week’s wages he’d begun drinking at six in the evening and continued into the small hours, moving from pub to pub and shedding his workmates as he went. The last reliable sighting of the man was at gone midnight, when an aggrieved barmaid he’d just given up pestering had seen him stumbling about outside the Old King. He’d made it across the Welsh Back, from which vantage point he’d relieved himself into the floating dock. Thereupon it was said that he’d staggered off in the direction of Redcliffe, the inference being that he was headed for the alleys beyond that salubrious neighbourhood, in search of a member of the small population of the city’s workforce which sees fit to labour at such an hour. His victim, the coroner had reported, was a young woman of no more than eighteen. Nobody had reported such a person as missing, which pointed firmly towards her not having been a Clifton lady, as some were whispering, but instead an unfortunate who dwelt beyond the law. The report ascribed Mr Brook with no motive. It seemed content to surmise that inebriation of the kind he’d already demonstrated that evening was evidence enough of bad character. Perhaps he’d killed out of frustration, too drunk to perform. Or maybe, if he could be given the benefit of the doubt – for it had to be admitted that Mr Brook was of previously sound character – he’d committed his crime out of guilt brought on by a post-coital flash of sobriety. Either way, he’d done his drunken best to vanish the evidence. First, he’d burned the body beyond recognit
ion. The report dwelt upon the detail, telling how the corpse was so badly charred that, never mind its melted face, the coroner had not even been able to deduce the colour of the woman’s hair. Conjecture had it that the man might have made use of the brazier at his worksite to carry out the burning. His workmates were evidently now unprepared to light the thing again, preferring to take their break around the flame of rumours instead. Upon extracting the burnt remains, Ivan Brook was said to have made a half-hearted attempt to bury the body in the very trench he’d been cutting before embarking upon his night of evil abandonment. He’d been discovered, still drunk, halfway through the task.

  The story did not add up. I took a mouthful of coffee and let it roll burningly across my tongue. For a start, unless they were suggesting the involvement of a horse, it was nonsensical to think that a man, even a labouring man as strong as Ivan Brook, would transport a corpse from beyond the centre of town right up Clifton Hill, simply for the pleasure of burning and burying it on familiar turf. The place was an active building site. Why not just slide the body into the river? It would likely have been discovered sooner or later, bobbing about in the floating harbour, or given up at low tide, but not before the rats, gulls and turbid water had disfigured it, and who was to point then to Mr Brook’s involvement in any case? Brook was apparently maintaining that he’d been disturbed in the act of uncovering the body, not burying it. That seemed plausible; all inferences to the contrary appeared to hang on his having been drunk. The man wasn’t popular with his workmates, it was alleged. He kept himself to himself. The absurdity of it! A leap of logic that would condemn a man for murder because he’d been observed pissing into the harbour at midnight. By that reckoning half the men in Bristol stood eligible for transportation.

  Innocent or guilty, the best Ivan Brook could hope for now would be the remainder of a life lived under a boiling sun, machete in one hand, razor stalks of sugar grass shredding the other, his broad shoulders withering beneath the weight of the work, and the heat, and the disease. Since the abolition of the trade, plantation owners are more desperate than ever for indentured labourers with which to replace those slaves who break daily in the cane fields. Any able body will do. It didn’t matter that Ivan Brook’s landlady had come forward to state that at an hour she could not be sure of she believed she’d heard her lodger bang his way up the wooden stairs and thump into bed. No, because even if Justice Wheeler failed to cook up sufficient evidence with which to ensure that Ivan Brook swung at home for the crime, he’d nevertheless force a settlement upon the man condemning him to die more slowly on a distant shore.

  I pushed the paper away in disgust. Mary, the morning shift waitress, was sidestepping between the nearby tables, tray held high. As she squeezed between two seatbacks her skirts were compressed so that for an instant I saw the real silhouette of her arse, rounded and full. The sleeve of her blouse, rolled above the elbow, revealed a strong smooth forearm, tense with the weight of the tray. Her chest strained against the cotton apron as she set the order down, and a fierce lust overran me, as complete and obliterating a sensation as that of climbing into a warm tub. A long brown indecent stain ran down one side of the girl’s apron across her hip and into the material of her skirt. It drifted closer to me.

  ‘Are you all done?’

  ‘Pardon?’ I shifted in my seat as the girl stretched across me to take my empty cup.

  ‘Because if there’s anything else …’

  ‘No, that’s fine.’

  She put the cup on the tray and changed her grip on it, holding the tray flat across her forearm, elbow pressed into the crook of her outthrust hip. I looked up at her face. A tangle of thick brown hair had escaped from the side of her bonnet. She pushed it back with her free hand, exposing the padded pinkness of her cheek, her jaw, throat.

  ‘You’d be sure to ask, if there was, I’m sure,’ she said, and turned, stepping past me with her backside inches from my face.

  More unsettling world, connecting up. Had I noticed Mary before? Not in that way, not that I could remember, though she’d served me on and off for two years. Yet as soon as I’d seen her in that light, or transformed her with my mind’s eye, she’d apparently noticed. I turned back to the window. The view through the nearest panes, not three feet away, was of a black frock coat, whose wearer was pulling a chain from its breast pocket, a silver chain attached to a watch. The terseness of the gesture was immediately evocative. I was up and out of my seat before I’d even checked the man’s face, but I saw it and was proven right outside. Two shards of grey either side of a dark beard. The officer from the Belsize, who turned to walk away, stomping across the flagstones as though he distrusted the very ground he trod upon.

  Ten

  I followed the officer down to the dock and along the quayside. He walked more slowly once he was within sight of the water, and before he reached the Belsize he paused to fill and tamp and light a pipe. I would have approached the man then, but found myself holding off. I stood at a distance, watching the officer observe the preparations for another voyage with a stillness that presented itself to me as longing. The ship leaving port was called the Sally-Ann. Stevedores were loading her up. There on the quay stood the usual barrels of brandy and beer and bolts of carefully wrapped cloth. Beside them were muskets in crates marked Belstan’s of Birmingham, and more crates no doubt filled with new kettles and pots and silverware, and there … of all things … stood a shrouded grandfather clock whose chimes sounded in protest when two of the dockhands picked it up.

  The noise nudged the officer on towards his own ship. It had been moved along the quay and now lay berthed beneath the new Merchant Venturers’ crane, the shadow of whose arm juddered across as I watched the man march authoritatively aboard. He was the Captain, presumably: I saw a seaman leap from the rail at his approach; even the gulls flapped from the deck at the pistol-shot succession of his hobnail boots up the gangplank. The crane-arm passed overhead again and I looked up at it, took in the ponderous sweep of the boom as it bisected the flat unfathomable web of lines that comprised the rigging. The sky above was thronged with towering grey clouds. They seemed to be rushing to keep the ship’s masts in place. As I watched, the sun edged a valley of cloud with silver, then broke through blue sky and warmed my face. The rigging acquired an extra dimension, turned from cross-hatched lines to a Chinaman’s puzzle hanging in space. I imagined myself a gull twisting in flight to skewer the lattice of ropes from bow to stern and was suffused with a sense of the possible; then another cloud overran the sun and the ropes tightened to a flat mesh and the crane-arm swung the dead weight of a pallet strapped full of casks back over my head again.

  The gangplank was warped and rutted. I advanced up it and fingered the rope handrail and stared down at the wedge of black water between the ship’s side and the dock. It smelt of brackish sweat and rot. Something welled up in my breast, an uncertainty gripping me from within. I was reminded of something I’d known once but lost. I blinked and saw for an instant two parallel scars high on a soft, dark cheek. Then I was staring at the ship’s side, which suddenly seemed colossal up close, pulsing with ingenuity and purpose and labour: so much work. Trees planted and grown and felled and hewn into boards cut to size and shaped and steamed and bent and fixed in place and caulked. Bristol, with its tidal port, had a tradition of building ships hardy enough to withstand a dumping, twice daily, fully loaded, on to the mud of the river bed: shipshape and Bristol fashion. From this hard start they set off for the furthest reaches. The tension in their sprung sides, the intricacy of their design, now appeared to me as raw capability and vision. I’ve always known I was delivered to these shores in the cradle of a ship like the one I stood before then, but the knowledge was so familiar that I rarely felt it to be true. Wavering before the Belsize I experienced the thing again as a debt I had no means of repaying. I felt belittled.

  What exactly did Carthy expect me to look for on board anyway? I didn’t know. Yet his blind leads are nothing new. I
nstead of hailing one of the crew and asking for permission to come on board, I bounced heavy-footed up the gangplank, aping the Captain’s assuredness; just as entitlement is evident in a man’s bearing, so an assured bearing creates the appearance of entitlement.

  I paused on the main deck. Towards the stern it was piled high with more casks on pallets, and crates and barrels filled, presumably, with tobacco and sugar and rum. Two men crabbed sideways round an open hatch, a chest slung between them, and set it with others on a pallet to await the returning crane. The larger of the two figures disappeared immediately behind a mound of webbing up towards the foredeck, but his mate, whose shirt was stuck to his back with sweat, turned to me.

  ‘Yes?’ the man asked, wiping his face.

  I nodded good morning and pulled a notebook from the pocket of my coat. The book, a present from Lilly, was bound in leather. I flicked through its blank pages, but my tactic – of not appearing hurried – backfired.